What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley · 377 pages
This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s *King Lear* centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, *A Thousand Acres* takes on t
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Rebecca Wells · 383 pages
The antics of a group of women in a small town where they were expected to raise babies, not Cain. The story is recounted by a mother to a daughter, the daughter thinking she is so much better because she got out of that town and is now a theater producer. The moral: mothers too were once rebels.
Before I Let You Go
Kelly Rimmer · 384 pages
Orphan Train
Christina Baker Kline · 400 pages
Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past. When 17-year-old Molly Ayer is sent to perform community service at elderly Vivian Daly's home in order to avoid juvenile hall, she discovers the two are very much alike, despite the
The Liars' Club
Mary Karr · 320 pages
The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.
Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison · 309 pages
Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.
Henry's Sisters
Cathy Lamb · 475 pages
"Ever since the Bommarito sisters were little girls, their mother, River, has written them a letter on pink paper when she has something especially important to impart. And this time, the message is urgent and impossible to ignore--River requires open-heart surgery, and Isabelle and her sisters are needed at home to run the family bakery and take care of their brother and ailing grandmother. Isabe
Identical
Ellen Hopkins · 624 pages
Do twins begin in the womb? Or in a better place? Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the facade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin. For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a
Winter Garden
Kristin Hannah · 448 pages
Can a woman ever really know herself if she doesn’t know her mother? From the author of the smash-hit bestseller Firefly Lane and True Colors comes a powerful, heartbreaking novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between the present and the past. Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her chil
Prayers and Lies
Sherri Wood Emmons · 312 pages
When seven-year-old Bethany first meets six-year-old cousin Reana Mae during a yearly family trip to West Virginia's Coal River Valley, it's the beginning of a kinship of misfits that saves both from a bone-deep loneliness. But as Bethany grows older, secrets in the small, close-knit community start coming to light with devastating effect.
Back Roads
Tawni O'Dell · 352 pages
"Harley Altmyer, the heartbreaking and lovable hero of Tawni O'Dell's debut novel, should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his stifling coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three beloved but unruly younger sisters. He has, at best, a shaky hold on the vicissitudes o
White Oleander
Janet Fitch · 390 pages
Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned-becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.
The Shipping News
Annie Proulx · 337 pages
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing
Till We Meet Again
Lesley Pearse · 560 pages
Susan Wright walked into a doctor's surgery and gunned down two members of staff in cold blood, then waited for the police to arrest her. Later that day a lawyer, Beth Powell, is assigned to defend her. Susan won't talk to anyone, even to Beth – until both women realise that twenty-nine years earlier they had been childhood friends. Talking about their troubled families and those happy summers the
When I Was Invisible
Dorothy Koomson · 352 pages
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Aimee Bender · 345 pages
The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t
Secret Daughter
Shilpi Somaya Gowda · 352 pages
On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to a baby girl. But in a culture that favors sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son.Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to a
Pigs in Heaven
Barbara Kingsolver · 363 pages
A phenomenal bestseller and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, Pigs in Heaven continues the story of Taylor and Turtle, first introduced in The Bean Trees.
Heaven
V.C. Andrews · 440 pages
Casteel Series Of all the folks in the mountain shacks, The Casteels were the lowest -- the scum of the hills. Heaven Leigh Casteel was the prettiest, smartest girl in the backwoods, despite her ragged clothes and dirty face... despite a father meaner than ten vipers... despite her weary stepmother, who worked her like a mule. For her brother Tom and the little ones, Heaven clung to her prid
The Language of Flowers
Vanessa Diffenbaugh · 322 pages
Victoria Jones spent her childhood moving from foster home to foster home. She believes she is damaged beyond hope and trusts nobody, connecting with the world through message-laden bouquets. Her messages are never understood until one day a man in a flower stall responds in kind.
The Warmest December
Bernice L. McFadden · 256 pages
"Childhood can be rough. But for Kenzie growing up in the Lowe home means opening the bottom drawer of her father's dresser to choose which of the three belts coiled, waiting like snakes, she wants to get whipped with; trips to Beehive Liquors for her father's vodka; and dreaming of the day she can escape apartment 5A. She goes to school, she holds odd jobs, and develops her own craving for the bo
The Valley of Amazement
Amy Tan · 589 pages
Violet Minturn, a half-Chinese/half-American courtesan who deals in seduction and illusion in Shanghai, struggles to find her place in the world, while her mother, Lucia, tries to make sense of the choices she has made and the men who have shaped her.